Even though I was on my deathbed with an incipient cold, Kathleen absconded to sunny North Carolina for a weekend of carefree abandon with her parents. Da noive!

(As Fossil Darling likes to say, “If you believe that, I’ll tell you the one about the three bears.” In nearly thirty years of mystification, he has never once explained this wiseguy utterance. If he’d only offer to sell me a bridge, I could at least ask for a prospectus.)

That’s not all! Next weekend, when I’m sure to be seriously stuffed-up, Kathleen will be off to Coral Gables, a Floridian demesne notorious for its round-the-clock frolics.  Would that I had never figured out that “filing” — as in, dumping a hundredweight of paper on the SEC, which is what I thought Kathleen was doing all those late nights — is just an anagram for “I fling.”

(You know that ancient Chinese classic, the I Fling. All the hexagrams mean “No blame.”)

Da noive! (And, speaking of Da Noive, how about this?)

Waiting to hear Just heard! that Kathleen has landed safely at Raleigh-Durham — her plane’s wings required de-icing at LaGuardia (!) — and I’m off to the movies (the new Paul Rudd thing) with a side-errand to the storage unit, a detour that I’d cut if it weren’t for Quatorze’s help. I’m on the edge of a cold, blah, blah, blah.

The Week at Portico: Still nothing in the way of a book page — although of course I had a look at the Book Review. And I wrote up a play, the hilarious 39 Steps, and a movie, the very non-hilarious Wrestler.

It was really too dreary today to venture forth in search of photographic subjects for this week’s “Daily Office” entries. On the verge of spring, or perhaps even a bit past the verge, the landscape is absolutely devoid of interest. Unlike summer, which colors rather brilliantly into autumn, winter does nothing but go on being bare. Until the Bradford pear trees that line the side-streets pop into confetti-white blossoms, the city will look a lot deader than it does in November, when looking dead has the virtue of novelty.

Having rejected the idea of using old photographs, I pulled out a sheaf of comic postcards.  (more…)

Once again, I was up late last night — being, once again, very productive. Tossing piles of magazines isn’t ideal work for one in the morning, but better late than you-kn0w-when. I crawled into bed with Lizzie Eustace, shortly after two, and read a few chapters with great interest, almost as if I were discovering Trollope for the first time. Worried that I might be waking myself up, I closed the book and then my eyes.

When Kathleen got up this morning, therefore, I did not. So I didn’t notice her wandering around the bedroom, half-dressed, for nearly an hour, unable to decide on a blouse. I woke up only when she realized that what she needed was a day off. Indeed: she has worked for twenty-seven of the last thirty days. She could handle her one-o’clock conference call from home.

So I decided not to go to the movies. I’m not so keen to see a movie, while staying in the neighborhood, that I’m willing to sit through He’s Just Not That Into You. The stipulation about staying in the neighborhood was important: we have theatre tickets tonight — The 39 Steps, finally — and I have a long list of local errands to run.

The Week at Portico: No book this week, I’m afraid — but I have a very good excuse, really I do! I read a novel in manuscript last week, and on Monday I shared my thoughts with the writer. Believe me: writing book reports is easier. (Okay, okay; I don’t write book reports.)

Here are links to this week’s Book Review review, and to two new Lively Arts pages, Ruined (MTC) and Two Lovers (2929 Productions).

If you had any idea how much stuff had to be moved to make it possible to put that lamp in the corner behind my desk, you would say, “RJ! You have too much junk!”

You’re probably saying it anyway.

I don’t know how I came into possession of the stegosaurus jigsaw puzzle. I mean, why; I’m sure that I bought it. When Ari Newell visited, a while back, I thought it might amuse him (“This is your idea of a puzzle, mon ami?” the young man, then aged four, would have quizzed), but I couldn’t find it. It was out in plain sight, but I couldn’t see it because I have too much junk.

I can’t let it go.

The synergy between The Daily Blague and Portico fascinates me, I like to think, as much as it would if the sites belonged to someone else. So it’s a good thing that I don’t buy everything that I like! Still, there’s a deep satisfaction in watching the various parts click together — when they do.

The Week at Portico:  From now on, leads to new pages at Portico will appear in a roundup on Friday. This week’s Book Review review, for example. A book that I’ve written up myself: The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Last Friday’s movie, Entre les murs. And, finally, for the first time: Paul Taylor Dance Company. I’ve gathered these notices into one convenient entry so that you won’t have to bookmark them for weekend reading.

Housekeeping Note:    Oops! I don’t know when I did it, but I managed to fold the Images folder at Portico‘s server into another folder — and I have no idea how to undo the mistake. That’s why most images at Portico won’t show.

That’s “most” as in “older pages.” Recently, I’ve created Images subfolders for each of the site’s branches, and that is how I am going to “fix” this problem — by updating the site to conform with current standards and practices. “I was going to do it anyway.”

We broke the “Never on Sunday” rule to take in the Paul Taylor Dance Company this afternoon. Better to say that I broke the rule when I bought the tickets in January. All I knew when I bought the tickets was that I wanted to see “Arden Court.” I couldn’t have told you why. It may have been a snapshot of the dance that was printed in a brochure several years ago; it may have been something that somebody said. According to this year’s brochure, “Arden Court” would be given three times, and the other two dates were for one reason or another impossible. So I broke the rule against doing things on Sundays and bought tickets for this afternoon’s performance. The result was not repentance, but a new rule.

Once a quarter, more or less, we’ll break the “Never on Sunday” rule and go to some matinee or other. Sunday matinees are usually at three in the afternoon; that leaves plenty of time for a late lunch — and for box-office crawling. Here’s how box-office crawling works:

Kathleen fills a few dozen large Post-It notes with information about plays that we want to see. (There are lots at the moment, more than we can afford to see.) Then she organizes the notes. (more…)

There are people who would never have accumulated the stuff that has piled up in our apartment over the years. I envy them.

It’s not that there wouldn’t be fifty times as much stuff if it weren’t for regular culls. But culling has never meant keeping the increase to zero. Until now.

Guess what I found! (more…)

Middle Collegiate. That’s the name of the church. Just so you don’t drive yourself crazy trying to figure out where this façade is to be found: Second Avenue between Sixth and Seventh Streets. Yet another Gotham Gothic. There are more cathedrals in Manhattan than in all of Europe.

When I woke up this morning, I was the barrenness of the fertile thing that can attain no more. (That’s Wallace Stevens, “The Credences of Summer,” my favorite poem in the world, even though I have no idea what it means.) I was so out of gas that I considered begging (asking would not have been effective) Kathleen to make breakfast. Not “make breakfast,” really, but — brew a pot of coffee, maybe, and perhaps boil an egg, with a slice of Entenman’s. . . However, when I hauled myself to the desktop, there was an email that put a puff of wind in my sails, and that was all I needed to move into the kitchen.

Among the several reasons for my inanition after an especially intriguing week —  I promise not to say another word about the incredible pow! of the Valmadonna show — was the hottest evening of chamber music that I can recall. (On Friday.) Chamber music in New York is always excellent at least, but the musicians from Marlboro who played at Grace Rainey Rogers on Friday had been touched by the fire of Divine Elbow Grease. Quatorze (taking the place of Kathleen, who spent the evening at the printer) put it very well: the musicians were playing for themselves. We were allowed to listen in. In a word: jazz.

For half an hour or so before the concert, Quatorze and I looked at late Bonnards, down in the Lehman wing basement. It’s a magnificent show — Ms NOLA has already been twice — and all I could think of was David Hockney. Now, he doesn’t talk about it much, but Quatorze is a trained oil painter — and yet he put up with cascading disquisitions from me on subjects about which he was far better informed. He may even have agreed with me slightly about Villa du Bosquet, Le Cannet, le matin. I agreed with him, of course, that it’s interesting that the default color for many of Bonnard’s shadows is blue.

In any case, Louis XIV himself never had such a rich couple of days. No — he really didn’t!

Having had a big day yesterday — by which regular readers will understand that I was out of the house for most of the sunlit hours, and a few of the dark ones as well — I was not in the mood for Valentine’s Day this morning. But I wanted to be. We needed a touch of fireworks. Kathleen has been working crazy hours; meanwhile, I’ve been clipping and pruning my life to the point at which, should I care to do so, I ought to be able to turn out a slightly gala dinner.

Lugging the onus of Valentine’s Day was entirely my idea. Kathleen, God love her, really does discharge the whole big-day thing with a morning kiss. “Happy birthday, dear!” (She doesn’t say “dear,” but never you mind what she does say.) Having grown up in a fautissimo comme-il-faut household, Kathleen is not big on observance. She also knows that there’s no danger of my forgetting birthdays. Having been born on the Epiphany, I never forget the names of all three kings, and what they gave baby Jesus. Kathleen long ago gave up trying to keep up with Balthazar et al.

Being Balthazar, I can tell you that the coolest thing on Valentine’s Day is coming up with a knockout dinner that isn’t really a whole lot of work to prepare. I’m always ready to lean on our fine library of porcelain, crystal, linen, and other accessories; without going to much trouble at all I can turn out a celebratory dinner even if it wasn’t a particularly memorable one. As Kathleen well knows: she kept asking for chicken pot pie (from Eli’s). She wanted to keep it simple — being married to the cook and all.

Notwithstanding, I settled on Escalopes de veau cauchoise pretty early. It’s an American dish, really: veal scallops in Granny Smith sauce. Okay, the sauce includes a bucket of cream and a flambé of Calvados. Not to mention the fact that I got the recipe from Elizabeth David, hardly a Yankophile. The asparagus that accompanied the veal behaved like well brought-up girls who, although they were expecting butter, were only too happy to fall into the apple cream that spilled off the veal.

That was the main course — the only one that I knew about when I left the house to do the shopping. It never occurred to me that I could count on Agata & Valentina for my first course and my dessert — both of them heart-shaped! Imagine! Tomato-pasta cheese-filled heart-shaped-ravioli! Who could resist? And a heart-shaped “chocolate silk cake.” As for the latter, all I know is that, having had a slice: major joltage.

As for the ravioli first course, I made a simple Alfredo cream, which turned out to be just the thing to point up its virtues. I had thought that the tomato was just for color, to make the ravioli red.  Not so! And the cheese filling jiggled nicely with my parmesan-laden cream.

It’s a terrible thing to find out that your wife is having an affair at a lovely dinner that you have prepared for her yourself, as I can only imagine from Kathleen’s distraction during dinner. While I was thinking Valentine’s Day and cooking and whatnot, Kathleen was thinking beading. She was, in fact, making a new chain for my Paul Smith reading glasses. Her mind was totally engaged on diameters — threads, needles, and perforations. She had no small talk at the table. Her politeness was exquisite, but it was clear that few eight-year-olds have been more eager to escape the table and get back to what they were doing.

As the cook in the family, I forget what it’s like to be called away from the important work that you’re involved with because it’s “supper time.” But no matter how distracted Kathleen is by the job in hand, she never forgets that, in order to make dinner, I put aside my own work hours earlier. That’s one of the reasons why she wanted pot pie.

There is not a happier husband in the world. I have reason to believe that the feeling is mutual.

This essay is dedicated to faithful aiders and abettors Flather and Tindley. Trust is not only the name of their bank.

In the Times this morning, news that scientists may really have figured out how to defeat the common cold — but also that big pharma will be disinclined to make the necessary investment in a cure for a “minor nuisance.” (Nicholas Wade reports). Regular readers may recall that I have an idea for re-inclining the drug companies to do their jobs. Patent protection for valuable medicines ought to be coupled with the obligation to develop less remunerative remedies.

But then, I am the worst sort of elitist socialist.

Kathleen has been working late all week, rushing for a deadline that will fall early tonight. (She doesn’t have Monday off, but since neither her clients nor the SEC will be making or receiving phone calls, she is looking forward to a quiet day.) I’ve been devoting the long evenings to the ongoing game of I Am My Own Executor, in which I go through drawers, closets, manila folders, and whatnot in a terrifying Stalinist purge of Expendibilia. Great bags of old newspaper clippings, expired subscription offers, and such superseded essentials as Avery labels for floppy disks are hauled to the garbage chute.

As if honor my efforts, the building’s latest and rather sketchy stab at refurbishment has adorned the door to what used to be known as the “trash room” with a handsome brushed metal plaque that says just that, “Garbage Chute,” in Gill Sans Bold. It’s enough to make one look for the red circle crossed by a blue bar , saying something like “Tower Hamlets.”

How was your weekend? Ours was very, very warm and loverly. Aside from an hour or so yesterday, Kathleen was at home all weekend — and so was I.

Ordinarily, Kathleen has her hair washed on Saturday afternoon, and, while she’s out, I tidy up the bedroom. Friday night, on our way home from Speed-the-Plow, it was decided that she ought to stay home this weekend, because she has been running fairly hard lately and needs a bit of rest cure. But how to change the sheets whilst she was still in bed.

After breakfast — a simple repast, but brought to her on a tray while she rested against a bank of pillows, I told Kathleen that she would have to go and sit in the living room for a while. All at once, she was Lillian Gish, defenceless in a cruel world. “Where will I go?” she asked, vacantly, staring at me with a pre-Raphaelite weirdness that, some time ago, but not anytime recently, would have taken me in. She came and sat on my lap, but she called me “Simon Legree, ogre.” Then she laughed at herself. “No one would believe this! You’ve just brought me breakfast in bed, and now you want to change the sheets and make the bed, and I’m…” There was no need to finish the thought.

By the time the bedroom had been dusted and plumped, Kathleen, ensconced in a wing chair, was too involved in something to move at once. I had to throw her out of the living room as well. This time, though, I was spared the saucer eyes.

Phew! I’ve been running around since I got up (not particularly early, it’s true). And things have gone slightly wrong all day. I arrived at Glass Restorations, to pick up a repaired piece of crystal, punctually at ten, which was all very nice except that the shop doesn’t open until half past. So I went for a version of my daily walk. Then I realized that I’d forgotten the grocery list. At the hospital, where I had a Remicade infusion early this afternoon, I discovered that the pink (Barocco) Nano had run out of battery power (how, I can’t imagine — or can I?). Now I’m off to see a dopey new comedy. At the movies. This evening: Speed-the-Plow. Phew!

There ought to be a ban on plays, concerts, and whatnot during the first two months of the new year. Then Kathleen and I wouldn’t miss anything because we were too depressed by the ghastly weather to venture forth in the evening. As it happens, we didn’t miss anything this week, but we trudged off to the Oak Room on Thursday night, and to Carnegie Hall last night, with very reluctant footsteps.

We knew from experience that we’d be glad we’d gone, in the one instance to hear cabaret singer Steve Ross, in the other to hear Orpheus and Anoushka Shankar, and we were. They were great evenings out. But they would have been more fun if we hadn’t been wishing like mad that we could just stay home.

(Moving to warmer climes is not an option. There are no Steve Rosses or Orphei in the Sun Belt.)

Now I have the pleasure of writing up these events for your reading pleasure. Don’t hold your breath; I’m in the middle of a rethink about writing about music.

***

Getting used to life after Dubya is an interesting pleasure. It’s great to return to a more genuinely political world, one in which contestants engage in argument with one another instead of spouting ideological non-responses. So far, it’s true, the Republicans, at least the ones in Congress, are not “contestants” but “constipants.” More about that anon.

Peter Steinfels wrote today about Catholic bishops in the United States — and how they haven’t said “boo” about Benedict XVI’s rehabilitation of the Lefevrists, including a notorious Holocaust-denier. I haven’t said “boo,” either. There really isn’t much to say, at this point, about the future of the Roman Catholic Church. One can only wait and see what individual American Catholics will decide, soul by soul.

I am waiting for the members of some aggrieved parish or other to respond to a church closing by contesting diocesan title to church buildings. The law is squarely on the bishops’ side, but the equity just as certainly is not, especially when one considers that many of the Church’s money problems stem from the hierarchy’s high-handed coverups of its pedophile problem. Who ought to suffer? Parishioners or bean-counting bishops?

If there’s a precedent for the impending rupture, it is not the Protestant Reformation, which concerned profound doctrinal differences, but the split between Reform and Orthodox Jews, which concerned differences about how much weight to put on doctrines that were not in dispute.

***

The other big deal at the moment is — what to call it? Gaza? Israel? Palestine? It sometimes seems that Hitler had the last laugh after all, for the fear of another Holocaust (the only conceivable justification for the harrowing of Gaza) provokes Israeli responses that, in turn, provoke ever more generalized anti-Zionism; and anti-Zionism, as Bernard-Henri Lévy assures us, is but anti-Semitism by another name.

***

What’s not particularly amusing these days is enduring the utterly hypocritical explosion of populism. — Those greedy bankers! &c &c. But no one capable of using a search engine has the right to start complaining now about what has been going on in American finance since at least the collapse of Enron. And before smacking any of those greedy bankers, let justice to be done to the cheerleaders who encouraged them, Alan Greenspan and the editorial-page editors of the Wall Street Journal.

***

The Schott’s Miscellany calendar entry for last Wednesday, “Applause at Classical Concerts,” addresses a felicitous problem. The fact that many concertgoers don’t seem to know the rules about applause is encouraging: it means that serious music is finding new audiences. Now, I’m the first to forget my manners when the first movement of a stormy concerto comes to a rousing conclusion. Clap away! (And glare right back at those blue-haired biddies  — it’s amazing that they still make ’em, ain’t it — and their dim husbands.)

At the Orpheus concert last night however, it appeared that many people in the cheap seats thought that it was only polite to clap every time the music came to a stop. This completely broke the spell of Zoltán Kodály’s Summer Evening and gave the ensemble’s excellent performance of Haydn’s 99th Symphony something of a junior high feel. It’s time for someone to post a small “Attention New Listeners!” notice at the bottom of the programs. For nothing is sadder at concerts than polite applause.

After the movies, Quatorze (the regular reader formerly known as LXIV — say it just like “guitars,” only with a “k” at the start and an “oars” at the end) and I went to the Museum, so that I could renew my membership, something that I always do in person, in the interest of optimal cash flow. We had lunch, and we saw the retrospective exhibition of Philippe de Montebello’s major acquisitions — and then we went to the Frick. I had already renewed my membership there (“recreated it” is more like it), and Q hadn’t been in a while.

I was distracted, however; I was thinking about my neighbor, a lady who lives just a few floors belowstairs. We met on the elevator this morning and fell into conversation. By the time we got to the lobby, I had given her my card. For the blog, silly! In the driveway, she asked me if I could guess what she did for a living. I had to confess that I’d heard that she’s a therapist. She shrugged with a grace that matched her voice, which — I hope she won’t mind my telling you this — is Julie Christie’s to the life. If it’s a small world, how big can a 692-unit apartment house be? A normal man would be hoping that my neighbor took a fancy to me, but, being me, I hope that she takes a fancy to The Daily Blague. I certainly fancy her as a reader.

I was also distracted by the walk down Fifth Avenue, on the park side’s picturesque hexagonal stepping stones, which substitute for pavement. Ordinarily a pleasurable, interruption-free stroll, it called for hiking boots today: the havoc of a volatile winter has made for a situation that brought to mind traumatic pictures that I saw as a child, of Siberian tombs thrust up through the ground by the permafrost.  It was a trauma to which my feet could relate so well that by 75th Streeet I insisted upon crossing Fifth. I assured Quatorze that spring weather will make the rough places plain, but I’m not sure that either of us believed me.

Bon weekend à tous!

That’s what this weekend was about: feeling  normal again. No more holidays, no more special events. And no more excuses, either.

“Excuses” isn’t the right word. “Priorities” is. I’ve had my hands full of priorities, ever since we got back from St Croix at Thanksgiving. As a result of prioritizing the priorities, I live in a much less cluttered apartment. Oh, the place still looks as cluttered as ever,  but then that’s just a look, a decorative tic. The kind of clutter that I’ve been working on lurked in closets and drawers and cabinets and under-the-bed  boxes.

I took a walk today, and it felt great. That was new. I’ve been limping home from recent walks, so completely out of shape am I. But after a big walk on Wednesday — almost four miles — and another mile or two on Friday and about a mile yesterday, I was my old self again today. I walked over to Central Park. It was very cold, but I think that that helped. I walked the oval that surrounds the Great Lawn. Then I came home. The word for the experience was “invigorating.” At my age, unfortunately, “invigorating” means “good for nothing but a nap in front of a roaring fire.” In the absence of a roaring fire, I merely dozed.

Before the walk, I ran errands. I had to buy a birthday card. It has been so long since I last bought a birthday card that Kathleen had to remind me, if that’s the word, that Barnes & Noble sells them. I had thought I had the perfect card: the William Eggleston photograph of what looks like a Manhattan on the rocks, bathing on a tray table in the sunlight pouring in from a jetliner’s porthole at 35,000 feet. When I opened the box, the card turned out to be a postcard: not suitable under the circumstances.

At least I finally got to the Eggleston show at the Whitney. It closed today. I was an idiot to put it off. But I did see it twice, first on Friday and then yesterday. I persuaded Kathleen to see it yesterday after breakfast, on her way to George Michael. “It’s not the sort of thing that I would go out of my way to see,” she said, “but I’m glad that you suggested it.” The amazing thing about Eggleston’s color is that it makes everything look clean, even the dirt. Take the two most humdrum kitchen photographs in the show: the freezer and the oven. Neither is what you’d call next to Godliness, really; but because all the colors seem right, the subjects appear to be pristine.

Paying for the birthday cards at Barnes & Noble — unsure of my choices, I covered the waterfront, hoping that Kathleen would choose the right one — I bought Transsiberian on an impulse. We were going to watch it after dinner, but, after dinner, we both felt more like reading. Or, in my case, writing.

Everyone I passed in the Park seemed to be much younger than I — about thirty-five, max. Many were not only not speaking English, but not speaking a language that I recognized. Of the Anglophones, the only one to make an impression was a guy who was walking with a woman in a red quilted coat. “I’ve heard the word before, but I’ve never heard anybody use it,” he said. How I wanted to know what the word was! But instead of repeating the word, he repeated himself. As if he hadn’t said it before, he said it again. “I’ve heard the word before, but I’ve never heard anybody use it.” This time, I heard the woman say, “Yeah.” I tried to remember which playwright employs such repetitions, as a tic to signify our failure to attend to one another. I doubt that my thought patterns would have been so grandiose if I hadn’t been walking along the river at Carl Schurz.

My good friend LXIV sent me the following very definitely not laugh-out-loud-funny joke:

Dear World: 

We, the United States of America, your top quality supplier of the ideals of liberty and democracy, would like to apologize for our 2001-2008 interruption of service. The technical fault that led to this eight-year service outage has been located, and the software responsible was replaced November 4. Early tests of the newly installed program indicate that we are now operating correctly, and we expect it to be fully functional on January 20. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the outage. We look forward to resuming full service and hope to improve in years to come. We thank you for your patience and understanding, 

Sincerely, 

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

It was all I could do to smile. Eight years is nearly an entire decade of one’s life.

What makes it all the more satisfying, if also the less tee-hee making, is that the end of Shrubbery coincides with the end of Irrational Exuberance. I honestly can’t determine which was worse.

I wish I were a better race horse. Pacing is everything, and my pacing is off. Long weekends throw me. Their promise of “three days off” rarely materializes. Perhaps that’s because I’m a self-employed worker who sets my own hours as a matter of course — what do I need with a day or two off, much less three. I could take every day off, if I wanted to. But that’s exactly what the problem comes down to. Because I could take the day off, I can’t.

The movie that we watched this evening was entirely Kathleen’s choice, but it’s my favorite Preston Sturges movie: The Palm Beach Story. Ordinarily, I wonder why this 1942 masterpiece doesn’t generally rate the top-ranking that I give it. But tonight I could see why it doesn’t. A movie about rich, entitled people being foolish and self-indulgent is unlikely to amuse the general public. Only people who have spent time with rich, entitled people being foolish are going to chuckle. Everyone else is going to be at least mildly offended.

I put it to you: how do you feel about the Ail & Quail Club scene? Bang bang!

For a change, I’m going to the movies this afternoon, not this morning. Kathleen and I will be having dinner with Megan and Ryan at a restaurant on Houston Street, so I’ll head downtown at about three — running some errands on the way — for the later-afternoon show of Revolutionary Road at the Union Square Theatre. Then I’ll hang out at Barnes & Noble for a while, before deciding that it’s much too cold to walk fourteen blocks and taking the subway instead.

I thought that this would give me a nice long morning to spend on little stuff, like organizing my desk drawers, but I used up all my motivation yesterday.

Later the same day….

I did run the errand — to exchange the cable box that I poured a glass of wine into over the holidays for a new one, at TimeWarner on 23rd Street. Then I came home. I did not go to the movies, largely because Kathleen was talking about coming home early. She had a bit of a sore throat, which is why our dinner date got postponed to Sunday evening. So, as usual, nothing that I predicted happened. You really ought to read my stated plans as fantasies, at least when they involve other people.

The good news is that I patched together a few scraps of motivation.

Kathleen’s doctor has advised her to try to escape the winter climate once a month, if she can, so she’s staying in Boca Raton a bit longer than necessary. The conference that brought her there started today, but she arrived on Friday afternoon, and she won’t leave until Wednesday.

In other words, I’m home alone. Unsupervised.

I was very good yesterday. I got up early, fixed breakfast, and got to work on the usual round of Saturday chores. I did a load of towels in the laundry — the dry cleaner can’t be made to wash them without fabric softener of some kind — and took down the Christmas wreath over the mantel. When I was done, shortly after six, the apartment looked not only neat but so well-groomed that the formidable Park Avenue matron that Lena Olin plays in The Reader wouldn’t sniff before sitting down. Not that we get a lot of Park Avenue matrons this far east.

I had a glass of wine or two with my spaghetti alla carbonara, but after dinner I zapped a mug of Lapsang Souchang and was constructive for an hour or two. Then I poured another glass and went out.  

Went out in a manner of speaking, that is, to the Webcam Tavern. I had a great time with a law school chum. How we laughed! It was very jolly. But then, suddenly, it was very late, and there were two empty wine bottles at my feet. Uh-oh.

I didn’t have to drive home, and I didn’t spend any money, either on wine or on phone bills. I don’t think I said anything too stupid. But I might as well have driven into a tree, lost my wallet (and the wad of cash in it), and irreparably insulted my old friend, considering how I felt about it all this morning. The worst thing about overindulgence nowadays is the intense remorse that grips me the next day. It is a moral hangover that I rarely experienced in my hard-drinking days. “I didn’t do anything,” I tell myself, but it’s not convincing, even when it’s true.

That I was fit only for reading today wasn’t cause for regret, because that’s what I do on Sunday. When I’m through with the Times (three days’ worth, usually), I read The Economist. Ordinarily, The Economist confers a fine patina of virtuousness, but not today. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out the drift of a story about the record-low nominal yields of Treasury bonds.

The physical hangover wasn’t so great either, but at least it was not one of those interfering maladies that makes fatal disease seem preferable (very preferable). I was able to make breakfast once again — and to order in lunch and dinner, and to eat it all with relish. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’m still a disappointing young man — at sixty-one!